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Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theory

I found myself listening to Glenn Beck’s program today, and he was speaking with the mayor of some town on the problems brought about by illegal immigration.

At the beginning of what I heard, he was coming at his opposition from a compassionate perspective: the way illegal immigrants are being treated is like modern day slavery – horrible working conditions, horrible living conditions, horrible pay. So what does this compassionate man advocate for a solution? Criminalizing them and deporting them, basically. It’s a nice new angle to take, hiding xenophobia behind a veil of concern. But it gets way better.
He starts going on about how nobody reads the newspaper like he does – he says that he clips out all the articles and puts them in a stack, because “they” (I assume it’s the liberal media establishment, who is in league with the liberal-corrupted conservative administration) take these related stories and scatter them all throughout the paper so that you can’t piece together the big picture in the way that he has. He never bothered to actually explain what the big picture was, just that he has seen it and that he discusses it on his program.

This leads me to believe that either 1) he doesn’t actually read the newspaper, 2) if he does, he doesn’t read the full stories, or 3) he just hopes his listeners don’t actually read the newspaper. How many times have you read a story in the paper that didn’t jump to another page? And how well would your news reading go if you had to figure out which clipping had half of the jump of the other clipping, and which other clipping had the other half? It’s an impossible way to read the newspaper if you actually care to get the “big picture” of the world, and anyone who reads a paper would know that. But it gets better.

He then starts talking about how he went to Detroit recently, and there are places of the city that look like Beirut. It’s true – there are massive parts of Detroit that look like you’re in some war-torn city in the middle east, crumbling and abandoned. But the great part is how he alludes to this being the result of illegal immigration. Never mind that industrial cities across the country are rapidly dropping in population, and have been doing so since the 1950s. In Glenn Beck’s world, this is because of illegal immigrants and the mindset of people who want to take from the tax base without giving back to it. Because illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes, cities like Detroit have abandoned factories and warehouses.

Again, this assumes that illegal immigrants aren’t buying things, which would send money directly to the cities they inhabit by way of sales taxes. But Beck’s argument got even better!

He transitioned directly from his criticism of people who want to take from the tax base without giving to it, and then turned that into an argument against “progressives” (you should have heard the tone he used to say that word) who are against tax cuts for the wealthy!